Korean Job Discussion Forums

[boogiet]

Has anyone lived in Vietnam and/or The Phillipines?
Any opinions on which language would be easier to pick up over a year?
Thanks,
BT.

[ajgeddes]

I don't really have much knowledge of either language, but I am willing to bet that Tagalog is immensely easier to learn than Vietnamese for an English speaker.

[Guri Guy]

My guess that Tagalog would be much easier to learn. Not only do many people in the Philippines speak English but there has been a fairly heavy linguistic influence from Spanish and English. Vietnamese on the other hand is tonal which make it more difficult for some. It's word order is much closer to English however.

Incidentally the words boondocks and yo-yo both come from Tagalog. Didn't know that until I read up on it.
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Vietnamese

Classification

Vietnamese was identified more than 150 years ago [3] to be part of the Viet-Muong (or Vietic) grouping of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, a family that also includes Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, as well as various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda languages, spoken in northeastern India, and others in southern China. Even though this is supported by etymological comparison [4], some linguists still believe that Viet-Muong is a separate family, genealogically unrelated to other Mon-Khmer languages.

History

It seems likely that in the distant past Vietnamese shared more characteristics common to other languages in the Austroasiatic family, such as an inflectional morphology and a richer set of consonant clusters, which have subsequently disappeared from the language. However, Vietnamese appears to have been heavily influenced by its location in the Southeast Asian sprachbund�with the result that it has acquired or converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and tonogenesis. These characteristics, which may or may not have been part of proto-Austroasiatic, nonetheless have become part of many of the philologically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia�for example, Thai (one of the Tai-Kadai languages), Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature, although their respective ancestral languages were not originally tonal.[citation needed] The Vietnamese language has similarities with Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and unreleased plosive consonant endings, a legacy of archaic Chinese.

The ancestor of the Vietnamese language was originally based in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam, and during the subsequent expansion of the Vietnamese language and people into what is now central and southern Vietnam (through conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the Khmer people of the Mekong delta in the vicinity of present-day Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnamese was linguistically influenced primarily by Chinese, which came to predominate politically in the 2nd century B.C.E.

Grammar

Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia and Chinese, is an analytic (or isolating) language. As such its grammar highly relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Whereas European languages tend to use morphology to express tense, Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.

Vietnamese is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. It is true that Vietnamese has many words that consist of only one syllable; however, most words are indeed disyllabic. This is largely because of the many reduplication words that appear in household vocabulary, or adjectives. More accurately, most morphemes are monosyllabic.

Vietnamese syntax conforms to the Subject Verb Object word order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language
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Tagalog

Classification

Tagalog is a Central Philippine language within the Austronesian language family. Being Malayo-Polynesian, it is related to other Austronesian languages such as Indonesian, Malay, Fijian, Maori (of New Zealand), Hawaiian, Malagasy (of Madagascar), Samoan, Tahitian, Chamorro (of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), Tetum (of East Timor), and Paiwan (of Taiwan).

It is closely related to the languages spoken in the Bicol and Visayas regions such as Bikol, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, and Cebuano.

Languages that have made significant contributions to Tagalog are Spanish, Min Nan Chinese, English, Malay, Sanskrit (via Malay), Arabic (via Malay/Spanish), and Northern Philippine languages such as Kapampangan spoken on the island of Luzon

Tagalog loanwords

The Tagalog language, due to extensive contacts with outsiders and foreigners, has developed a unique vocabulary utilizing words from its own Austronesian roots and also from other foreign languages. According to the linguistic expert Jose Villa Panganiban, "of the 30,000 root words in the Tagalog language, there are 5,000 from Spanish, 3,200 from Malay, 1,500 from both Min Nan and Yueh Chinese dialects, 1,500 from English, 300 from Sanskrit, 200 from Arabic, and a few hundred altogether from Mexican, Persian, Japanese, and other languages". Some linguists claim that borrowings from Malay cannot be ascertained at this time, as words which have come from the Old Austronesian language and those which are borrowed from Malay are still ambiguous and similar enough to be distinguished from each other, but some linguists studying the Malay language came to recognize semantic cognates with other Austronesian words, thereby classifying some others to be of Malay provenance.

English has been used in everyday Tagalog conversation. This kind of conversation is called Taglish. English words borrowed by Tagalog are modern and technical terms. But, English words are also used for short usage (many Tagalog words translated from English are very long) or to avoid literal translation that makes the meaning bad and repetition of the same particular Tagalog word. English makes the second largest vocabulary of Tagalog after Spanish. In written language, English words in a Tagalog sentence are written as they are. But, they are sometimes written through Tagalog transliteration. Here are some examples:

* Basket - basket
* Basketbol - basketball
* Breyk - break
* Dayari - diary
* Dikri - decree
* Drayber - driver
* Dyip - jeep
* Elementari - elementary
* Eksport - export
* Greyd - grade
* Groseri - grocery
* Iskor - score
* Keyk - cake
* Kostomer/Kustomer - customer
* Kompyuter - computer
* Manedyer - manager
* Masel - muscle
* Misis (Tagalog transliteration of "Mrs.") - used as a term for "wife"
* Mister - used as a term for "husband"
* Pulis - police
* Skrin - screen
* Sori - sorry
* Suspek - suspect
* Taksi - taxi
* Trapik - traffic
* Traysikel - tricycle
* Treyning - training

Taglish - Awesome ^^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_language

[mithridates]

I would go with Vietnamese for the reason that it's much better established as the national language, is spoken by more people, Vietnam's more politically stable and has a booming economy, and Vietnamese don't speak English as well as Philippinos do. I expect you'd get a lot of code-switching between English and Tagalog, and maybe some local dialect/language and slang thrown in all the time.

[DHC]

I have lived in Vietnam for 15 years and I can assure you that Vietnamese , a tonal language , is much more difficult for a westerner to learn.

[Tiger Beer]

[wo buxihuan hanguoren]

[mithridates]

[Tiger Beer]

I've found very little opportunities to ever use Vietnamese outside of Vietnam unless you are at a Vietnamese restaurant back home. Even then its just a novelty factor - just learn the key phrases.

Tagalog on the other hand, I see recognizeable Filipinos in Seoul subways and everywhere in the world. They love it if you speak Tagalog. Plus while Filipinos will almost always speak English TO you, they will seldom if ever speak English if there is another Tagalog speaker nearby involved in the conversation.

ALSO.. I've put in some good hours studying both languages.. by the time I can learn one phrase in Vietnamese.. I can learn about 30 phrases in Tagalog. In other words, you'll progress significantly faster with Tagalog.

My two cents anyways. Maybe I'm biased, but Tagalog is more fun and easier. Vietnamese is better however if you are going to do the ESL Teacher in Asia for a long time and need to be in a country with ESL jobs.